It is Monday morning. Your support inbox has 47 unread emails from the weekend. A third of them are asking the same three questions. Another third are straightforward issues your agent could resolve in seconds. The rest need a real person. Your team spends the first two hours of the week clearing the backlog before they can get to anything else.

The Email channel changes that Monday morning. Give your agent a dedicated inbound address and it handles the emails that do not need a human - reads the message, writes the response, sends it. Your team opens their inbox to the conversations that actually need them, not a queue of questions they have answered a hundred times.

In this article, you'll learn:

• How the Email channel works
• How to set it up
• How to find your agent's inbound email address

How the Email Channel Works

Once the Email channel is set up, your agent gets a unique inbound email address (visible on the Deploy page). When a customer sends an email to that address:

1. Your agent reads the email and understands what the customer needs.
2. It searches its knowledge sources for the best answer.
3. It drafts a response and sends it - or, if the question is beyond its scope or matches a handoff trigger, it escalates to your team.

This works alongside your existing support email setup. You can forward emails from your main support address to your agent's inbound address, so customers continue writing to the same email they're used to.

How to Set Up the Email Channel

1. Go to the Deploy tab.
2. Find the Email card and click Configure.
3. Follow the on-screen setup steps to configure the email channel.

Your Agent's Inbound Email Address

Your agent's inbound email address is shown on the Deploy page next to the Email card. It looks something like helpjuice_abc123@inbound.outlearn.com.

To start receiving emails through your agent, you have two options:

• Share it directly: Give customers this address as an alternative support contact.
• Forward from your existing inbox: Set up a forwarding rule in your main support email (e.g., support@yourcompany.com) to automatically forward incoming emails to your agent's inbound address. This way, customers keep emailing the address they already know.

Best Practices

• Set up email forwarding from your main support address so customers don't have to learn a new email address.
• Make sure your agent's handoff is configured before enabling email - some questions will need human follow-up, and without a handoff, those emails will have nowhere to go.
• Monitor your email conversations in the Conversation & Training tab for the first week to confirm your agent is responding accurately and escalating when appropriate.
• Let customers know to expect an automated first response - a simple line in your email signature or auto-reply sets appropriate expectations.